Matthew Cooperman

Matthew Cooperman’s most recent book is a collaboration (with Romanian artist Marius Lehene), Imago for the Fallen World (Jaded Ibis Press, 2013). Other works include Still: of the Earth as the Ark which Does Not Move (Counterpath, 2011), Daze (Salt Publishing, 2006), and ASacrificial Zinc (Pleiades/LSU, 2001). He teaches poetry at Colorado State University, is a poetry editor for Colorado Review, and lives in Fort Collins with his wife, the poet Aby Kaupang, and their two kids.

Praised in recent years as a “calculating, improvisatory, essential poet” by Daisy Fried in the New York Times, Charles Bernstein is a leading voice in American literary theory. Pitch of Poetry is his irreverent guide to modernist and contemporary poetics."

Print of ‘Lyric Poetry’ by H. D. Walker, a mural in the Library of Congress, which appears as a Detroit Publishing Company postcard. Via Wikimedia Commons, courtesy of the New York Public Library.

Those interested in theorizing lyric must tread lightly these days, for a great deal of recent critical energy has been invested in sounding the historical and interpretive contours of this “super-sized” modern genre.[1] Much of this work seeks to disrobe lyric of its transhistorical pretensions, revealing by way of materialist critique that what we took for an enduring genre is actually a product of deeply codified — and distinctly post-Romantic — reading practices.